Gone: What does it take to really disappear?

Matthew Sheppard held his breath as long as he could, swimming
underwater with the current until he was out of sight. Then he
surfaced, swam to a dock and pulled himself out. After retrieving a
bag of clothes and $1,500 in cash he'd stashed the night before, he
walked quickly down the road to a prearranged spot where a friend -
the one person to whom Sheppard felt he could entrust his secret -
waited with a car. They took off southwest towards the friend's
home in Mexico, just south of the Rio Grande.

Two weeks before, when Sheppard sat down to formulate a plan to
fake his death, he'd been armed only with Google and LexisNexis. He
pored over recent reports of missing persons and faked deaths,
looking for strategies to emulate and pitfalls to avoid.

That, in fact, was how he'd come up with the idea of leaving his
BlackBerry conspicuously at a gas station on the Friday before his
disappearance. It was a classic misdirection: someone would grab
the phone and start using it, Sheppard hoped, and any cop who
didn't buy the drowning would trace the phone to some petty thief -
while Sheppard's real trail faded. The ruse backfired when the
thief sent a few messages and then quit, convincing Sergeant
Roberson that Sheppard was alive.

Now ensconced at his friend's house in Mexico and working nights
as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, all Sheppard had to do was
wait. He would monitor coverage of his disappearance and once he
was sure his wife had collected the insurance he would contact her
and explain everything. She'd meet him in Monterrey, where he had
already scouted out an agave plantation they could buy on the
cheap. He'd spend the rest of his days making tequila.

But after two months, he started to get antsy. He missed his
wife and daughter too much to wait. So, assuming that the
authorities might still be logging Monica's incoming calls, he
bought a prepaid phone, called her number and broke the news that
he was still alive. She was hysterical at first, alternately
furious and overjoyed.

The family reunited in Iowa, where they stayed at a motel. As
the life-insurance company stalled, they lived off the cash from
Monica's sale of their Arkansas house and belongings. In Mexico,
Sheppard had obtained an Iowa driver's licence and social-security
number for one John P Howard, to whom he bore a passable
resemblance. Then he constructed a CV around the identity,
transposing his work history on to fake firms and posted it online.
For references he gave the numbers of prepaid phones. When
prospective employers called, Sheppard pretended to be HR and
verified his own past employment.

Meanwhile, the stress of living on the run was taking its toll
and Sheppard lost almost five stone. After reading that the
Arkansas police had contacted US marshals about his case, he became
wracked with paranoia. He would see cars parked at the defunct
dealership across the street from the motel and imagine federal
agents waiting to pounce.

Eventually, "John P Howard" landed an offer for a
health-and-safety manager position in Yankton, South Dakota. The
family packed up and drove west, where an estate agent helped them
find a rented house in a secluded area near a lake. Sergeant
Roberson got the call from the Searcy elementary school in early
August. He quickly subpoenaed the school, tracked the request for
the Sheppards' daughter's records to Yankton, and called the US
marshals. South Dakota-based federal agents found an address for
the family and contacted the landlord. "I rented to that guy," he
told them upon seeing Sheppard's picture, "but his name is John
Howard." The alias led quickly to Howard's very Sheppard- like CV,
which was then still posted on Monster.com. Soon afterwards, in a
scene befitting Sheppard's most paranoid fears, police officers
staked out the house, setting up in trees nearby, waiting for him
to appear.

Sheppard was gazing out of his back window at deer when he heard
cars speeding down the gravel road toward the house and then the
marshals bursting through the front door. His wife screamed, "He's
not here!" but the agents found him a few seconds later hiding next
to a bed. He didn't say a word.

In a rare study tracking people from the US federal government's
witness-protection programme that appeared in a 1984 issue of
The American Behavioral Scientist, a psychologist named
Fred Montanino outlined the difficulties of living under a fake
identity. He determined that people were likely to feel "severe
social distress" and "a pervasive sense of powerlessness", driven
by the necessity of constant deception. "When the social fabric is
torn, when individuals are erased from one part of it and placed in
another," Montanino concluded, "problems arise."

Trading in your old identity means a lifetime of duplicity that
complicates every social interaction, lacing inconvenience and
doubt into such humdrum tasks as registering a car or getting
health insurance. "You do, to a certain extent, have to erase who
you are," says Frank Ahearn, author of the guidebook How to
Disappear. "Victims of stalkers have the motivation of saving
their own lives." But those looking to "pick up and live a
palm-tree lifestyle," he says, often "don't realise how difficult
it is to start over."

A life on the run means enduring the intense isolation of
leaving friends and family. "It takes an extremely dedicated person
to forget everything in their past," says William Sorukas, chief of
domestic investigation for the US marshals, "and never make that
phone call back to the family, not after ten years go back home and
drive through the neighbourhood again."

Of course, technology can allow the kind of anonymous contact
with friends and family that wasn't possible in the past. "Mom can
have a phone under another name that only you call, or maybe you
use encrypted email," Rambam says. "But somebody always makes a
mistake."

Even in a world of cross-linked databases and location-aware
phones, most people living on the lam are undone by complacency.
"Do you have a hobby - are you a butterfly collector? Everything
that defined your prior life, you have to stay away from," Rambam
says. Yet almost anyone on the run comes to crave ordinary human
contact. "When the newness wears off, you ask, 'How do I live my
life?'" Ahearn says. "'How do I date? How do I not tell people
about where I'm from?' People loosen up and go back to who they
were." And that's how most attempts to vanish end. A school
registration, an email back home. All mistakes look avoidable in
hindsight, of course, and the nature of such stories is that only
the failures surface; the successes take their methods to the
grave, both the feigned one and the real one. To succeed at
disappearing is to never have your methods told. But for those who
are caught, there's always the sour taste of what might have
been.

Three months into his ten-year prison stretch for theft and
insurance fraud, Matthew Sheppard shuffles into the deputy warden's
office at the East Arkansas Regional Unit on a sweltering summer
afternoon. Clad in a baggy white prison uniform, he is seven stone
lighter than when he went into the Little Red River. Sitting across
from me on the warden's couch, he reflects on his tale in a subdued
tone, tinged with relief. Even after his arrest, he says, "nobody
ever asked me the details" of the escape. Monica Sheppard, too,
pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and was sentenced to six months
in prison. Prosecutors accused her of being involved from the
beginning, but Detective Sergeant Alan Roberson still isn't sure.
Either way, she was technically guilty from the moment she learned
her husband was alive.

Looking back, Sheppard has trouble making sense of it all. He
probably could have admitted wrongdoing and left Eaton, maybe even
kept his job. But at the time, "it felt like the whole world was on
my shoulders." He's hoping for a work release. "I've been through
the hardest time of my life: physically, mentally," he says. "I
would settle for working at McDonald's." He'd known the school
registration was risky and wasn't surprised when I told him that
was how he'd been caught. Mostly, he wants people to know he's
remorseful for what he inflicted upon his coworkers, friends and
family. By disappearing, he just swapped his burdens for another
set. "What was worse?" he wonders. "What I was dealing with when I
did this? Or what I had to deal with when I was on the run?"

Comments

Regardless of all efforts to change one's identity, their handwriting will tell the truth and identify them. As a handwriting expert, I have been called on many times to authenticate someone's identity. Not only that, but also to describe the writer's personality for potential for dangerous behavior. Handwriting can be the key.

Sheila Lowe

Dec 2nd 2009

Sentimentality is the main issue at work here methinks. People regularly disappear themselves and are never seen or heard from again, because they leave their old lives behind in totality. It is possible to disappear, but you have to shut everything you love out of your mind forever. Unless of course you are an addict and have mental health issues, and end up homeless.

Sheila, my own handwriting has changed beyond recognition twice in my lifetime (over the course of more than 40 years). My signature and even the way I dot my Is and cross my Ts. Mind you I myself have changed lives completely, but not in the way the likes of Matt Sheppard and Pat McDermott. Sometimes it just happens to you...